rgoogle-sheetsgooglesheets4

googlesheets4 - specify col_types using vector


I am trying to read a google sheet with many columns (gs1) into R. I also have a separate data frame in R (df_col) that has a list of the columns in gs1 along with their formats. Is there a way to read gs1 into R using the columns formats specified in df_col?

For example: gs1

col1  col2  col3  
a     1     01/01/22
b     2     01/02/22
c     3     01/03/22

df_col

col_name    col_type
col1        c
col2        i
col3        D

To read in gs1:

gs1_df <- read_sheet(ss = "gs1", sheet = "Sheet1", col_types = df_col$col_type)

Whenever I currently follow the logic in the example above, I get an error stating Error in check_length_one():! col_types must have length 1, not length 3.

I'm guessing this is because there is an issue with directly calling the column of df_col in the function but I'm not sure how to get around that. Does the column need to be converted to a string before using it in the function?


Solution

  • The documentation sets out that col_types is expected to be a

    string of readr-style shortcodes, with one character or code per column

    You have currently got the short codes correctly defined, but in a vector of length nrow(df_col). You need to convert it to a string (or technically a character vector of length one).

    col_types  <- paste(df_col$col_type, collapse = "")
    gs1_df <- read_sheet(ss = "gs1", sheet = "Sheet1", col_types = col_types)